Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated

The twenty-sixth edition of FOSDEM will take place on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January 2027 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Doing this axis of evil routine without even a token mention of censorship by "western" regimes, including your own, suggests a level of willful blindness or self-delusion. The censored internet has always been Eurasian, etc.

The modern record for a matter-wave superposition stands at a nanoparticle composed of roughly 7,000 sodium atoms (about 8 nanometers wide), achieving a massive "Schrödinger's cat" state at the scale of a small virus.

So then particles don't exist, and viruses also don't exist? Is "reality" just a dynamic pattern that doesn't exist in the naive sense? As astute stoics we should not worry ourselves with such matters, "shut up and calculate"?

There is something about quantum theory that is different in character from any physical theory posed before. To put a finger on it, the issue is this: The basic statement of the theory—the one we have all learned from our textbooks—seems to rely on terms our intuitions balk at as having any place in a fundamental description of reality. The notions of “observer” and “measurement” are taken as primitive, the very starting point of the theory. This is an unsettling situation! Shouldn’t physics be talking about what is before it starts talking about what will be seen and who will see it? Perhaps no one has put the point more forcefully than John Stewart Bell:

> What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system . . . with a PhD?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209

You are enthralled! "There is something there still!" you say to yourself.

But there is nothing there! The game engine just figured that the particle would collide with the triangle, and altered its velocity accordingly. But you are too caught up in your assumption that you do more experiments (I think this is what our physicists are doing in our world). But what ever you do, you can only observe the behavior implemented by the game engine, and not the game engine itself, or the computer that is running it....

But you can imagine it. You can imagine an explicitly implemented program and a computer with limited memory that is running it. And if you are allowed to consider it, they can do other experiments. Instead of looking into smaller and smaller things, you can look for other observations that might confirm this. Maybe you can go really far and see if they are not allowed to go beyond some threshold (Ref: The movie "The thirteenth floor").

And would that be pursuing something metaphysical?

Yes, physics is about learning about the rules that the game engine implements. It’s not about learning about some reality outside our own, that’s the domain of metaphysics. Physics can’t answer questions about what is happening outside our own reality, and indeed neither can anything else inside reality because (as you pointed out) we can only test and observe what the game engine allows.

But the observation that I describe does happen in our reality. It is just that if you look for a reason for such observations here, you are not going to find it.

It is just like when say, biology have to reach out to chemistry and chemistry to physics and physics to math for deeper explanations for processes and observations that are native to their domain. So as unprecedented as it may be, physics should may be try to reach out to metaphysics as a way to explain observations that happen in its domain..

I don't know what observation you're talking about--you were giving an analogy, right? What am I misunderstanding about your claim?

> It is just like when say, biology have to reach out to chemistry and chemistry to physics and physics to math for deeper explanations for processes and observations that are native to their domain.

Yes, this is emergent complexity and physicists already look into this (e.g., holographic principle). In your game/engine analogy, we're still talking about examining the game, not the game engine.

In my example, the observation would be something alters the path of a particle that is shot at the center of the triangle (where it is empty space). This happens in the game reality, but cannot be explained by looking within the same (for example, if you expect to find a smaller triangle at the center of the bigger triangle)

Without a common understanding of that word, any further discussion is useless..

  There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
  There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face.
  And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
  No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

  The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
  He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
  And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
  And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

  Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
  The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
  And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout...

All our experiments were conducted using FinalSpark's NeuroPlatform (Jordan et al., 2024), providing access to organoids over a cloud-based system, as shown in Figure 1. In this setup, forebrain organoids are cultured to approximately 500 μm in diameter (Govindan et al., 2021) and contain mature neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes displaying robust network activity. Maintained under continuous perfusion, they can remain electrophysiologically active for up to approximately 100 days under favorable conditions

This is absolutely fucked. The original argument for these human brain organoids were they're only 10k neurons. Now five minutes later they're talking about energy savings in scaling to cortex-level human brain cloud API.

So we built a harness that drives fleets of Sprites through write, checkpoint, sleep, wake and restore, over and over, verifying every byte that comes back. We pointed it at 400 JuiceFS Sprites for about 5,000 cycles. A nonzero number of them permanently lost the ability to checkpoint. Well … fuck.

Enter: the Sprites Block Device (SBD). It takes a bucket and presents it to the Linux kernel as a block device, over NBD. The Sprite formats that device as ext4 and mounts it, the same way you’d mount a disk on any Linux box. Duh.

This blog has has a strange vibe like "the last BRAWNDO we made in a bathtub may or may not have killed some customers lmao, try NEW BRAWNDO 2.0 TODAY!" that I didn't realize could work for corporate messaging around an in-house CoW cloud filesystem.

1. Your brain, and then

2. John von Neumann, and then

3. Your brain

Explaining a bit more… Before you tell John von Neumann to start working on anything, you go there and read and understand it first. And when John von Neumann brings you the solution, you will know if it’s right, or if it’s too much, or if it’s completely solving the wrong problem, etc.

Sure, we could go to nine domain expert agents next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, eight worked out pretty well, and nine is the next number after eight. So let’s play it safe. Let’s make a thicker sandbox, add some IOPS and call it the Bedrock9SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we’re a business, that’s why!

You think it’s crazy? It is crazy. But I don’t give a shit. From now on, we’re the ones who have the edge in the multi-agent game. Is Devin the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Bedrock AI-DLC is the best a man can get.

Here’s the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don’t tell me what to invent—I tell them. And I’m telling them to stick two more agents in there. I don’t care how. Make the agents so token efficient they’re invisible. Put some on an Alexa. I don’t care if they have to cram the fourteenth agent in perpendicular to the other ones, just do it!

Earlier this year I spent considerable time making a six-agent multi-LLM configuration in OpenCode with a Bifrost multi-model router before just switching to OpenSpec and GLM-5.3 and calling it a day.

[1] https://theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-...

While the news isn’t great, not much changes for me personally. We’ll still show up and do the work as I’ve previously talked about, on the chance that we can prove the oncologists wrong. Outside of that, I’ll prioritize spending time with the kids, trying to handle as much as possible to make things as easy as possible for Sara after I die, and enjoying the days that I have left.

https://eric.blog/2026/05/24/six-months/